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The true Test of festive fulfilment

Amanda Dunn

We don't need to be busy all the time. Busy will be back with us soon enough. Photo: Paul Rovere

ONE of the best things about Christmas Day is that there's only one more sleep until the Boxing Day Test. Controversial viewpoint, I know. I have friends who still say ''Oh, that's right, you like cricket'', with that slightly disappointed tone they usually reserve for when they see how I wrap Christmas presents (anything other than a square or rectangle throws me, OK?).

With its six or more hours of play every day, for five consecutive days, Test cricket harks back to an era when life was less complex, and the nature of entertainment was wholly different.

But it also highlights how much our relationship with time has changed, rubbing up against the modern cult of busyness and our inability, or perhaps unwillingness, to clear our schedules, even when we're on holidays.

So full are our days, in fact, that being supremely busy has become something of a badge of honour, as though a lack of time confers meaning rather than the more unpalatable truth, which is that it sometimes gets in the way of it.

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This reaches its apotheosis in the frantic weeks leading up to Christmas, with end-of-year gatherings, concerts, and extra shopping and cooking somehow having to be squeezed in between the usual demands of work and life. Most of us are just staggering on to Tuesday.

People who have no interest in Test cricket - especially those who have partners who love it - quite reasonably resent its hour after hour of seduction and demand. They can feel their partner's time being sucked into the game's five-day vortex, taking the grocery shopping, household chores and possibly some personal hygiene with it. So the prospect of a rain delay can be the source of considerable joy.

But the time it takes, and the time it asks me to take, is exactly what is so irresistible about Test cricket. The length of the game is fundamental to its theatricality - its ability, in the modern parlance, to ''construct a narrative''.

Providing the teams are reasonably evenly matched, four innings can offer wild vicissitudes in a team's or an individual's fortunes, the shift even hingeing, inexplicably, on a single over or ball. It can offer up a gripping contest between a particular bowler and batsman, it can peel back the peculiar psychology of ''form'' - no matter if the player is in or out of it - and it can raise curly cultural questions, such as why groups of men in the crowd delight in wearing matching wigs and costumes in the heat of summer.

For me, Test cricket alters time in another sense: it takes me back to my childhood, when I first watched the game, peppering my English father with questions about lbw, fielding positions and who was going to win, for god's sake (that was usually at about over six, morning session, day one). I had an inchoate affection for the game, but I hadn't quite got the hang of it. That would take a little more time.

In the interceding years, the players have become faster and fitter - not many girths of Boonie proportions can be found in creams these days - and technology has encroached in a mostly constructive way. But the game has really altered little from my first encounters with it in the early 1980s: the wonderful Bill Lawry is still excitable (''Got him! Yes! Or wait … has he? No! He's dropped it! Oh dear, oh dear''), and women are still disturbingly invisible, not only in the broadcast but in the ad breaks too, despite the fact that, according to Steve Allen from Fusion Strategy, they make up at least 33 per cent of the Test cricket television audience.

Like all good narratives, a tightly contested Test is best read closely, following the language of the game and the story it tells.

For those of us lucky enough to be on leave for the week between Christmas and the new year, the Boxing Day Test will again make these demands on us. It might be tempting to feel guilty about clearing a day here or there - perhaps even all five - for the game, allowing ourselves to sink into its story.

No matter how much the idea might jar with modern sensibilities, we don't need to be busy all the time, nor do we need to seem to be busy all the time. Filling every hour of every day with activity robs us of important time to relax, and think. Busyness will be back with us soon enough.

At some point in the Boxing Day Test, a flubbed catch, a mix-up between batsmen or a quick succession of wickets will no doubt cause Lawry to tell us, as he always does, that ''it's all happening here''. Just for now, in these quiet days, that should be enough for us.

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